A company of English capitalists were spending a good deal of money on the west coast of South America in building railroads into and over the Andes. One of these roads was intended to reach a famous silver mine, from which the Spaniards, two or three hundred years before, had taken large quantities of the precious metal, but which had long ago been drowned out and abandoned. The railroad was to take up pumping machinery by which the mine could be cleared of water and to bring down the ore in car-load lots. For some purpose or other they wanted a stationary engine in those high altitudes, and their agent in this country ordered one from me. I was having my fly-wheels and belt drums cast by Mr. Ferguson, whose foundry was on 13th Street, west of Ninth Avenue, some seven miles distant from my shop in Harlem. He had a wheel-lathe in which I could have them turned and bored, and they were bored to gauges and shipped direct to their destinations. This time I had two wheels to be finished, so I sent the gauges with a tag attached to each describing the wheel it was for, but neglected to go and make a personal inspection of the work. Some months after I received a bitter letter from South America, complaining that they found the wheel had been bored half an inch smaller than the shaft, and that they had to chip off a quarter of an inch all around the hole where the barometer stood at 17 inches, and physical exertion was something to be avoided. The case was somewhat relieved by the fact that I always cored out a larger chamber in the middle of the hub for the purpose of getting rid of a mass of metal which would cause the hub to cool too slowly, finishing only a length of two inches at each end of the hub, which was 10 or 12 inches long. As the engine had been paid for on shipment and ran well when put together, there was no great harm done, but I was sorry for the poor fellows who had to do the work. Except the one already mentioned in my first governor pulley, ten or twelve years before, this was the only misfit I can recall in my whole experience.